Comment by liveoneggs
6 days ago
The first paragraph of this blog calls senior skeptical developers "unserious" but the person who wrote it has a cartoon gopher as his avatar.
The next few paragraphs basically say "the tool run arbitrary programs on your machine, pull in arbitrary files, and use that to run more arbitrary commands" and then blames you for thinking that is a bad sequence of events.
In the best possible light I (an AI-neutral reader) can paint this rant on a hosting-company blog (why publish this?) is that 1) allowing random textbots to execute programs on your work computer is good (disagree), 2) those chatbots do, in fact, occasionally say enough correct-ish things that they are probably worth your company paying $20+/month for your access (agree).
I think tptacek is generally worth reading. He is one of the users with the highest karma on this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek)
I’m happy to have read this, which is reason enough to publish it - but also it’s clearly generating debate so it seems like a very good thing to have published.
I generally like tptacek, but this piece has major flaws. His dismissal of all copyright concerns on the grounds that some developers engage in piracy is horribly lazy.
High karma in an internet community is not something I respect automatically. Pewdiepie and every other little online personality have tons of followers and likes.
tptacek has always come across arrogant, juvenile, opinionated, and difficult to work with.
co-mingling your work identity with your gopher-identity is a dangerous game; I should clarify the gopher is not UMN-related.
1 is not a requirement for using agents. You give agents access to a specific workspace and set of tools that you know are safe, similar to how you give the junior dev access to scratch but not prod. Feels like this comment is not in good faith if I’m being honest.
According to the article you are not a serious user of LLMs and are as out of date as the curmudgeon straw men being attacked.
There are zero "safe" tools where you don't control the inputs.